Broken Prey

fishing in Bemidji, but would be on his cell phone. Lucas called and found the guy in a boat.
    “Haven’t caught a goddamned thing,” he grumbled. “I’m saying it loud enough for the guide to hear me.”
    Lucas explained about the DNA: “I need to talk to the people in St. John’s who were the closest to Pope.”
    “That’d be his treatment team,” Cale said. “My second’s name is Darrell Ross. I’ll call him and tell him to hang on to the team until you get down there. They normally get off at three o’clock . . .”
    “No problem, we can be down there in an hour and a half. We’ve got to be back here by four, anyway.”
    “Wish I could be there, especially since I’M NOT CATCHING ANY FISH,” Cale said. “Charlie Pope, huh? I’ll tell you what—we’re not taking the fall on this one. We saw it coming from a long way back, and we told everybody who’d listen.”
     
    LUCAS GOT OUT OF THE BUILDING , cut across town, and found Sloan, with a shoe bag, standing on the sidewalk outside Nordstrom’s. They headed south down the Minnesota River again. “Pope’s face will be all over the Northern Plains. He won’t be able to stand outside his car to take a leak without somebody recognizing him,” Lucas said. “That’s one good thing about a really ugly murder; people pay attention. Maybe we oughta make all murders ugly.”
    “All murders are ugly,” Sloan said. He was trading his old shoes for the new ones. Both pairs were nearly identical black wingtips. “If they were pretty, I wouldn’t be quitting.”
    “Aw, man . . .”
     
    THE RICE MURDERS had taken place just south of the city of Mankato; St. John’s Security Hospital was located eight miles to the north, in a red-brick riverside hamlet originally built around a grain elevator and a creamery. Now the town was mostly a bedroom community for hospital employees.
    The hospital sat in the hills west of the town and came in two parts. A reception center for new inmates and visitors sat down a short access road; the road continued through the parking lot and farther up the hill, to the main hospital.
    The reception center was a new, low, brick building that looked like an elementary school, except that the back side had a chain-link prison pen attached, with glistening concertina wire looped through the fence. The main hospital was an older brick-and-concrete-block building that was just Gothic enough to scare the shit out of people who saw it.
     
    THEY CHECKED IN at the lower building, and a chunky young woman named Nan escorted them up the hill. The hospital was set up like a prison: an outer area for administration and support, a hard wall running through the center of the building, with confinement areas behind the wall.
    From an earlier visit, Lucas knew that the level of confinement varied from section to section: the worst sexual psychopaths were kept in hard cages under twenty-four-hour surveillance, while the inmates of other areas, where there was no immediate threat of violence, had a good deal of freedom. Some sections housed both men and women, which had caused some problems with sex and even the occasional pregnancy, but which also gave those areas a greater feeling of normal human society.
    “Most of the people here really are . . . a little lost,” Nan said. “They’re not bad people. Most of them aren’t stupid. The world is just a little too much for them.”
    “Most of them,” Sloan said. “There are a few . . .” He shook his head.
    “Sure,” she said.
     
    THEY SIGNED IN AND LEFT their weapons with a security officer. Entry to the confinement area went through twin electronic barred doors, with a hardened guard’s booth between the two doors. The booth was called “the cage” and was made of concrete block up to waist height, and from there to the ceiling with thick armored glass set into concrete pillars. The people inside the cage controlled the entry, the locks in the confinement blocks, and monitored the cameras that were spotted through the hospital.
    Nan took them as far as the first barred gate, pointed out a man leaning against the wall in the confinement area, behind the second gate. “That’s Harvey Bronson. He’ll take you to your conference.”
    They said good-bye and stepped through the first door, which slowly closed and locked behind them. They then walked through an airport-like metal scanner, emptying their pockets and removing their shoes. When they were through and